Whip It

That said, however, Quills does have remarkable energy and wit, and is probably the most purely enjoyable entry in Kaufman’s sub-oeuvre of literary excursions. The sexual gamesmanship and lubricity are a good deal more fun than they were in Henry & June and Being. Quills is also free of that strange, inhibiting combination of respectability (high art) and disreputability (nudie cheesecake in the soft-porn style of Zalman King) that made those fine but flawed films occasionally laughable.

In the end, it‘s the game performances that make Quills so effervescent. Rush plays the Marquis as a splendidly campy, untamable, incorrigible roue, a genially dirty-minded advocate of the destructive, insurgent power of prick and cunt against priggishness and cant. As far as he’s concerned, he‘s merely extending the late revolution from the tumbrel and the guillotine to the bedchamber and, on occasion, the lavatory. Caine meanwhile accesses his underused evil side to render a portrait of unbending rectitude, as secure in his convictions as the Marquis is in his own. Winslet’s role is too small to permit her to give one of her full-tilt, Fearless Kate performances, though she fills the chalk outline of her underwritten part with her characteristic energy and verve. But it‘s Phoenix who steadies the film’s center, using his pained eyes, his endearing speech impediment and his nervous physicality to delineate all the torments and compromised sympathies that convulse his idealistic young cleric‘s heart and soul.